How Tone and Vibe Can Improve Your Upland Bird Hunting

A flushing dog that's trained to work at just the right distance ahead of hunters is a massive advantage in a pheasant field or grouse thicket. 'Just the right distance' changes with the terrain and what you prefer, but I reckon we'd all agree that if your dog flushes a bird close enough for you to take a good shot without having to rush, you can chalk that up as a win.

Inevitably, even the best retrievers and spaniels will range out farther than you'd like. You've been there. You're working your way through a beautiful field of waist-high switchgrass. Your dog is getting excited and its tail is whipping back and forth like a wiper blade at warp speed as its nose vacuums up bird scent. You know the flush is going to happen any second ... but it doesn't. The bird is running, trying to get away from the mayhem so it can flush safely. Your dog follows its instincts and chases in hot pursuit. Suddenly, your 20-yard dog is at 40, and a moment later it's more like 50 and the next thing you see is a long-tailed rooster gliding over the hill. You never had a chance.

With wild birds being the cagey fowl that they are, you’re not going to win the game every time. However, there’s a super-simple way to at least make sure you’re the one who’s calling the shots and keeping what you can control – your dog – hunting for you rather than letting circumstances dictate its behaviour.

I'm talking about silent communication between you and your dog using the vibe and/or tone feature on the SportDOG Brand collar. I reckon heaps of people overlook the usefulness of this form of communication.

If your dog is collar-trained, you've probably had to give it a correction when it's gone too far. If you've properly introduced your dog to the e-collar and it knows what's expected in the field, I'll assume that when you give your dog an e-collar nudge meaning 'come back', it'll change direction and return within a decent hunting distance.

Well, a similar concept applies to training your dog to respond to the vibe or tone. (I use tone for hunting situations, but you can do the same thing with vibe.) I train my dogs that a continuous tone (meaning I’m pressing the transmitter button continuously) means I want them to come all the way back to me just the same as if I was blowing a whistle.

As an extension of this idea, I also train them to change directions when I give them a brief tone. What happens is they hear the tone and start to turn back as if they're gonna come all the way in, but when the tone stops, they keep hunting in the direction they turned.

Why do all this? Because quieter is better in bird hunting. Training your dog to respond to the tone eliminates the need for yelling or whistling and therefore alerting every bird within a mile that something’s up. Indeed, the e-collar tone feature is the ultimate silent whistle.

Even if the season's already kicked off by the time you're reading this, you can definitely chuck this into your bag of hunting tricks. Just use the tone button together with your whistle or voice, and then after a couple of training sessions switch to using the tone on its own. Most dogs get the hang of it pretty fast.

Take some time to work on using this handy e-collar feature. It'll keep your dog hunting hard at that magical 'right distance' and that means more birds in the bag.